[ SECRET POST #2576 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2576 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 040 secrets from Secret Submission Post #368.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

Whether in books, movies, games, etc - what storytelling pet peeves do you have? Cliches, overused tropes, words that you hate, overused names or characters?

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[sporkly]

Temporary amnesia and "it was all a dream" plots.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

How long must amnesia be in effect for it to not be temporary?

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I love temporary amnesia. It's one of my favorite tropes.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

Only Alice in Wonderland can do "it was all a dream" and get away with it.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

Beautiful protagonists. I know the urge to write about good looking people and otherwise make your protagonist perfect, but if the character has to specifically be described as super attractive, it's a turn-off for me.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[inkdust]

Setting aside sentences (

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

stupid misunderstandings that only happen because no one talks to each other, and the writer can't think of a better way to further the plot.

most of the time it would literally just take as simple a dialog as "hey why did you do X" "i didn't do X, i did Y, what are you talking about?" "oh my bad" and the problem would be DONE. but instead it carries on for a thousand years and ruins everything until it's resolved. especially annoying in romance plots where people ~break up and cry and it's sad~ just because they have zero communication skills.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[herpymcderp]

When authors insert their own dialects when writing characters from obviously foreign cultures (ie. American English for a character that is canonically a Dubliner). Or not even trying to use period appropriate slang for, say, a story set in 1920.

My rage is GREAT when I see this happening.

Also I don't really like it when all of the characters have the same speech mannerisms. People grow up living different lives, and they speak differently. When people who are professional authors fail to account for this, I get irrationally angry.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

Long descriptions of what the setting looks like.

When the main character is the author's self-insert. They are a writer and they have all these writer problems that only writers understand ALAS, why couldn't they have been like everyone else, satisfied to toil away at a REAL JOB while letting their poor creative soul rot? Or the story is about them finding the courage to become a writer.

Killing off characters unnecessarily.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

1. "OH NOES I AM A 16-YEAR-OLD GIRL IN LOVE WITH MY 30-YEAR-OLD TEACHER" (A.K.A. that one cliché that shows up a lot in shojo manga and is really fucking creepy.)

2. "OH NOES I'M IN LOVE WITH MY BROTHER" (A.K.A. the other super-creepy manga cliché.)

3. "OH NOES I'M IN LOVE WITH MY BEST FRIEND'S SISTER I MUST KEEP THIS A SECRET OR OUR FRIENDSHIP WILL BE COMPROMISED" (A.K.A. fucking contrived melodrama.)

4. "IT'S SO HAAAAAARD TO BE A MIDDLE-AGED, UPPER-MIDDLE CLASS WHITE AMERICAN! MY LIFE IS SO TRAGIC, AND DEVOID OF MEANING. NOW I WILL SPEND THE NEXT TWO-HUNDRED PAGES ALTERNATING BETWEEN COMMITTING ADULTERY AND HAVING PRETENTIOUS INNER MONOLOGUES, BECAUSE YOU SEE, THIS IS ALL DEEP, INTELLIGENT SOCIAL COMMENTARY." (A.K.A. the reason why I gave up on literary fiction.)

5. "I AM A TEENAGE GIRL WHO IS DEEP AND INTELLECTUAL AND SPECIAL, AND I'M SO NOT LIKE THOSE OTHER GIRLS WITH THEIR MAKEUPS AND THEIR FASHIONS AND THEIR SHALLOWNESS- OH HEY LOOK, HERE'S A HOT GUY WHO WILL CHANGE MY LIFE FOREVER, HE MIGHT BE A VAMPIRE/WEREWOLF/FAIRY/ANGEL/ETC., OR HE MIGHT JUST BE AN ORDINARY ASSHOLE TEENAGER, BUT EITHER WAY HE IS JUST AS DEVOID OF PERSONALITY AS I AM AND OUR TWU LUV IS BEAUTIFUL AND ETERNAL" (A.K.A. You've Got to Be Fucking Kidding Me, Why Am I Even Reading This Shit?)

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

- It was all a dream, but everyone hates this one. Except people who write it.

- Shock factor for the sake of shock factor. We get it, you were in seventh grade once too. You're not anymore.

- Related, but on a darker note... when writers put their characters through the angstiest possible scenarios just to see how far they can go. I'm looking at Joss Whedon and Russell T Davies in particular, though I know they're not the worst offenders.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[tabaqui]

'I didn't tell you/I won't tell him/her/them for their own good/to protect you/him/her/them.' Not only wrong and stupid but usually deadly and/or backfires.

'It's complicated' instead of explaining, or 'Nothing' or 'I'm fine'. Use your words. A good author can make the plot interesting without leaving most of the people in the dark re: the other characters.

Characters that hide illness or injury until they pass out/nearly die. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Also, the people who know there's something wrong but 'don't want to say anything/don't want to butt in'. ARRGH.

Any story where any character that isn't Becky-the-fangirl using fandom language or things like 'gah'. Stoppit.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

The use of ridiculous pronoun substitutes. I get it, having nothing to fall back on but names and gendered pronouns can get boring, but God, be sensible. A character may refer to another with whom they have some kind of connection as "his friend" or "his companion", but when it isn't a complete stranger why on earth would they be referred to as "the blond" or "the larger man"? And why why why would you use those for your POV characters?

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[siofrabunnies]

Epithets that aren't relevant to the current scene. Calling Ron Weasley 'the ginger' only makes sense if his coloring is important information right when it's mentioned (like some random first-year who doesn't know his name is talking about him, or something), and it works a lot better if you're contrasting his coloring against someone else's. Don't just throw it into writing where it's not needed.

And, goddammit, remember that these people have names. Names are how people talk, so names are what you should default to. Saying someone's name over and over is a lot less noticeable than constant epithets.

I have several other rants about it, but I don't want to fill a whole page.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[sarillia]

Constant bickering = "sexual tension" and a good foundation for a relationship

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[nyxelestia]

Simplistic characterization.

i.e. Tony has some personal problems --> woobie!Tony; Steve is from an older time --> naïve/bigoted!Steve; Thor has a light rambunctious personality -->ALLCAPS!Thor; Nat is reserved --> robot!Nat, etc.

I especially hate the Steve one. One of my favorite things about the first Captain America movie is that it subverts so many of the super-patriotic and simplistic characterizations of Captain America, and instead of following that path so much of fandom has gone even further in the other/original direction. :(

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[squeakycat]

Writing out a character's accent. OMG does that get on my nerves! Particularly when they write the accent of where I'm from they 1. Don't realize that there isn't one generic accent for the region, and 2. They spell it so badly that even saying it out loud it's hard to tell wtf the character is saying!

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

COMA DREAMS.
It's the laziest trope ever. Only the Wizard of Oz gets a pass. Everything else that tries the 'and then she woke up and it was all a dream' needs to stop doing that.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[tamabonotchi]

-name-dropping items from real life for no reason e.g. "he took a sip of his Dr. Pepper."

-needing a fancy word for body parts and talking about them all the time

-character is nothing but a horny teenager

I was reading old Bleach fanfic and I never realized how much of the fics were this bad

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[lynx]

I'm agreeing so hard to all of these, it's a wonder I read anything at all these days. Maybe I've become overly critical.

With nothing new to add, I only have to name the last thing unsaid by this thread: QUEERBAITING CAN GO FUCK ITSELF.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Bioware's attempt to write in political metaphors into game mechanics based on min/maxing your reputation gains (and absurdly juxtaposed with game designs where you create political change through mass homicide). DA2's attempt to deal with discrimination and terrorist probably scarred me for their treatment of extra-judicial rendition in The Old Republic.

Similarly, breaking the narrative to insert a political screed. Take Chalker's Dancing Gods where a character is introduced with a rant rant about divorce law, and then comes back a few chapters later with a rant about income tax. Similarly, De Camp's Rogue Queen suffers a bit by the overbearing "alien culture discovers 20th century monogamy" dialogues.

Magic power escalation, or for that matter, magic systems rather than magical conflicts. Character starts off popping light bulbs and ends up god.

Coitus interruptus, especially when it's done on television to put relationship development into a hell of characters acting stupid for the sake of putting the romance on the high-competition weeks.

(Side rant: movies on network television. A few years ago I found myself in a hell of trying to watch the original Rear Window with carefully developed pacing chopped into bits by adds for reality shows.)

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[blunderbuss]

1. For bad things to happen to a character for TEH DRAMA. If a character is hit by a car, that should have either happened because of plot reasons or it should affect the plot. It shouldn't happen so that Love Interest A can finally realise that she DOES love him, and now he might die, oh noes! Then you're just being cheap. (Yes, random accidents do happen, but this is a story, not real life. Everything should happen for a reason.)

2. If someone is agonising over two hard choices then you had better make sure that those two are his ONLY options. I fucking hate it when there are perfectly valid third options that they can at least investigate but instead the story insists that there are ONLY TWO OH NOOOOO HOW CAN HE CHOOOOOSE.

3. Two people can be in love and have perfectly valid reasons to be angry at each other dammit! And it can't just be fixed with the power of love or one character being shown as Wrong And Misguided.

4. It is exceptionally rare for a person or group or whatever to be 100% eeeeeeevil with no redeeming traits. People do what they do for a reason other than Teh Evilz and I will always love and fear a villain more if they're a human being rather than a puppet full of darkness. Even if you want to make a really dark character, that doesn't mean that you can't do things to humanise them, even if only in the past before they became a monster.

5. BUT. DO NOT WOOBIFY THEM. DO NOT EXCUSE THEIR BEHAVIOR. Being a human being capable of love and decency can actually make someone even MORE loathesome because they still voluntarily do terrible things despite knowing better. And, for the love of god, if you want to redeem them then by god you had better fucking work for it. And even then they will never be able to undo the terrible things they've done. Luke may have forgiven Darth Vader but that does NOT mean that he's redeemed, dammit! Sometimes a villain is too far gone to ever be worthy of redemption. Don't even try.

6. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something that the characters don't. It is not when the audience knows something that the characters should know if they used their brains or goddamn talked to each other.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, and, "X smelled like cigarettes and ash," or "Y tasted of strawberries". Like, what? That's invariably inserted out of nowhere. If they smoke or if they've been eating strawberries, and then only if it belongs in the story.

It sounds terribly romantic when people insert random aromas, but the smell of cigarettes or whatever isn't usually realistic, let alone arousing. People just smell like themselves.

Re: Your Storytelling Pet Peeves

[(Anonymous)]

Badly written romance. Unlikable people becoming Instantly Desirable!!! for no apparent reason. Characters who throw away everything they have for Twoo Wuv. Characters who make stupid-ass decisions for Twoo Wuv when they're not the type to do so. Obligatory pair-offs of all the characters ever. Writers who look at being single or uninterested or in a nontraditional relationship as a fate worse than death. All the romantic plotlines following exactly the same path.